‘Ash vs. Evil Dead’ Is a Shotgun Blast to the Face of Boring Prestige TV

“That is horrible,” a character tells jut-jawed, beer-bellied antihero Ash J. Williams (Bruce Campbell) on a recent episode of Ash vs. Evil Dead, after he regales her with another tale of his misspent youth — before adding “and awesome.” “Which is everything I do,” he responds proudly.

It’s everything his show does, too. Exploding out of writer-director Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movie trilogy like viscera, Starz’s sitcom-length small-screen continuation of the story is violent, vile, crass, and cruel. It’s also funny, frightening, exciting, and exceedingly well-made, with a truly cinematic approach to its tale of a trio of demon-hunters fighting an army of darkness that can stand against that of any show on the air. In a time of plodding, ponderous prestige dramas, Ash’s experimental, experiential zeal is a breath of fresh air, even if its breath stinks of blood.

The first weapon in Ash vs. Evil Dead’s arsenal is blunt, but effective: Its very, very short running time. Most episodes clock in around a tight 25 minutes sans closing credits; you can head to the fridge for a beer, sit down, watch an episode, and get up to toss your empty and go to the bathroom in under half an hour from start to finish. Now I’m often skeptical of claims that excessive length is sinking otherwise workable shows — if your complaint about, say, Mr. Robot is that the episodes are too long, that’s not really your complaint about Mr. Robot; your complaint is that you find what Mr. Robot is very consciously doing with its time a drag. Given that we’re talking about a storytelling medium that routinely runs into double-digit hour counts per season, good shows would be good at pretty much any individual unit length.

But there’s something to be said for “brevity is the soul of wit” as a guideline for rock’em sock’em television adaptations of beloved genre franchises. Even the most ardent admirers of Netflix’s street-level-superhero Marvel shows — Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage — rightfully complain about “Netflix bloat,” both in terms of episode count (Jessica Jones and Luke Cage in particular ran out of story with six episodes to go) and episode length. Do we really need another walk through moodily lit streets from one set-like location to the next? How many times do the characters have to talk about the exact same subjects just to run out the clock? These shows would be better if someone took an axe — or perhaps a chainsaw hand — to them, ruthlessly trimming fat until only the cool characters, intense action, inventive set pieces, and thematic underpinnings remained.

On Ash, that’s exactly what you get. The show derives much of its madcap energy from the sense that anything can happen at any time preciselybecause there’s so little of that time for anything to happen in. Each episode’s short length necessitates (often literally) breakneck pacing that suits co-creator and original Evil Dead director Sam Raimi’s trademark blend of slapstick comedy, brawl-based fight scenes, gross-out “splatstick” humor, and genuinely nasty jump-scares and gore to a tee: If the filmmakers want to include something, then they’d by-god better hustle. The whiplash sensation you get from watching the show switch from tone to tone at a moment’s notice is unlikely to be replicable in 60-minute chunks, and may well grow grating and exhausting even if they’d somehow managed it.

Then there’s that mix of tones itself, which is quite unlike anything else on television — praise that’s frequently leveled at good TV shows of various kinds but rarely if ever this apt. The thing about Ash is that it doesn’t compromise any of its constituent tonal elements to suit any of the other ones. The dialogue is inventively funny, especially when it’s lampooning its hero’s broad chin and even broader machismo; lead actors Bruce Campbell (reprising his iconic role as Ash, convenience-store clerk turned reluctant warrior against the forces of Hell), Ray Santiago (as Ash’s Eraserhead-haired protégé Pablo), and Dana DeLorenzo (as the sardonic third member of their unholy trinity, Kelly) deliver it with with the tight timing of an experienced comedy troupe. Their sparring is more verbal than physical (except when one of them is possessed by a demonic entity, of course), but considering the influence of the Three Stooges on the Evil Dead series, the use of a core trio with shared goals but divergent personalities — Ash is cocky, randy, and a little bit of an actual dirtbag; Pablo is twitchy and earnest to a fault; Kelly brings the pair down to earth and always sounds like she’s issuing her lines through a mouthful of cigarette smoke — makes good comedic sense. Guest stars figure into the mix, too; playing Ash’s horndog dad Brock, The Six-Million Dollar Man’s Lee Majors delivers a torrent of disgusting double entendres like he was born to do it.

Next up is the action, which can make the hallway fight scenes for which the Marvel/Netflix shows have been rightfully renowned look anemic by comparison. And not just because of the vast quantities of fake blood spilled, mind you: Take away the horror trappings and this is just plain entertaining fight choreography. Ash and his pals’ battles agains the Deadite hordes and their hellish overlords usually take place in some sort of confined space (bars, cabins, bedrooms, trailers, basements) or while moving at eighty miles an hour in our hero’s Dodge. The fights take advantage of these unique physical environments, which invest each rumble with a specific sense of space and outfit the combatants with an array of different makeshift weapons each time out. The action may be kinetic, but it’s never chaotic, in the sense that it’s always crystal clear: You can bellyfeel the physical stakes involved in each move the fighters make.

Then there’s the “splatstick,” which goes hand in dismembered hand with the action itself. Simply put, it is unbelievable how disgusting this show is, and how those blood-and-guts gross-outs are played for laughs. One recent episode featured a nude corpse’s small intestines attacking Ash; a serpentine monstrosity with lamprey-like teeth arrayed around a grasping sphincter, it bit Ash on his nose and crotch before wrapping around him and slowly pulling him up and through the corpse’s distended, diarrhea-gushing anus, with the deadman’s pierced penis dangling in our hero’s face much of the time. Needless to say, this kind of humor is an acquired taste, but the sheer brio involved — the degree to which the show appears to be asking itself “Can you top this?” and answering in the affirmative every single week — takes full advantage of cable TV’s freedoms. If you thought the show would leave memorable moments like Ash chopping off his own evil hand to stop it from murdering him back in the era of anything-goes ‘80s exploitation flicks, think again.

But the violence is by no means solely silly. Even in the age of Hannibal, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead et al, Ash can be an exceptionally nasty show when it puts its mind to it, and it does so nearly every episode. For example, Ash’s beloved Dodge was possessed by the evil spellbook called the Necronomicon Ex Mortis (literally “The Book of the Dead of the Dead”; I’ll never get over how gorgeously stupid that is), it mercilessly killed the teenagers who’d taken it for a joyride while keeping one sole survivor locked inside, forced to watch as her boyfriend and all her friends died agonizing deaths. Fingers were chopped off by slamming doors, faces ground to hamburger by spinning tires that lowered slowly onto screaming faces, young lovers exchanged their goodbyes through the blood-streaked windshield before the car finally threw its victim from the hood and ran him over, dragging his burning body behind it. Ash does this kind of thing again and again — it gives you the goofball mayhem you want, then ratchets it up higher and higher until your laughter trails off into a stunned “Jesus Christ.” This gives the proceedings real emotional heat even at their silliest — a heat complicated by the personality of Ash himself, a guy who’s prone to taking the easy way out of hard situations, with disastrous consequences for everyone close to him. He’s more than a lovable fuck-up; sometimes he’s a just-plain fuck-up.

This is the ugly, sleazy, stupid beauty of Ash vs. Evil Dead in a nutshell. With no aspirations to high art whatsoever, it’s a radical experiment in tone and format that has more in common with shows that are famous for taking big weird chances, like Atlanta or Louie or the aforementioned Hannibal, than it does with the more straightforward genre fare you’d be tempted to lump it in with. It makes a virtue of its short running time and derives its aesthetic and thematic juice not from heavy-handed explorations of sociopolitical issues or big philosophical questions, but simply from mixing up all its diverse interests and seeing how weird they taste together. It’s Peak TV at its most creatively free. Showrunners around the dial would be wise to take up their shotguns and follow its anarchic lead.